Making your own butter is easier than boiling eggs, but does it really beat
the bought stuff?

In America, there's a fashion now for holding butter-churning parties. Invitees may be asked to BYOC (bring your own cream) and then stand around taking turns cranking a handle on a vintage glass churn and watching until, at last, a golden lump of butter forms.

This might sound like a bizarre sort of entertainment, when perfectly good butter is available in every supermarket. But it's no odder, really, than other current fashions for old-fashioned craft, whether it's the hipster crochet designs of Etsy or the "show-stopper" creations of The Great British Bake Off.

A revival of handmade butter is part of a wider trend for ambitious cooking projects, as celebrated in Tim Hayward's intrepid Food DIY: How to Make Your Own Everything (Fig Tree, £25). As DIY cooking goes, butter is actually easy. I will probably never "make a clambake in a wheelbarrow" or "smoke a salmon in a gym locker", two of Hayward's wilder adventures. Butter, though, is easier than boiling eggs. All it takes, as Hayward says, is "a small child and a jam jar".

You pour a 300ml tub of double cream into a large jam jar. The cream needs to be at room temperature. Ask a child to shake it with all their might, or do it yourself. It will seem at first that nothing is happening. Then it goes thick and sandy, like tahini, and you will really despair. Just when your arms can take no more – about 10 minutes – you hear a sloshing sound and see a yellow clump as the fat globules solidify. Butter!

It's even easier with an electric stand mixer. Nineteenth-century dairymaids, slaves to their plunge churns, would have killed for such a machine. Cover the bowl with clingfilm and whisk at medium speed until the cream separates into a lump of butter and a sea of buttermilk. The butter needs to be drained in a sieve – keep the buttermilk for pancakes or soda bread. Rinse the finished lump in very cold water. Add Maldon salt, if you like; I do.

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Homemade butter, eaten very fresh – it's best on the first or second day – has the clean sweetness of cream, which is hardly surprising. A Victorian writer of 1870 wrote that the best butter was that churned "every morning from sweet cream", eaten for breakfast "on a new cool baked oatcake…accompanied with a cup of hot, strong coffee".

The question, though, is whether it's worth making butter from scratch. Make the Bread, Buy the Butter is an informative and funny book by Jennifer Reese (Atria Books, £9.65), which weighs up the pluses and minuses of various homespun foods. Reese makes her own bread (and yogurt and granola) but can't in the end justify homemade butter, delicious though it is: "I was very proud of my first homemade butter. Then, for comparison, I tasted a bit of unsalted butter from the supermarket and it was also smashing." And the price was much lower, given the cost of cream.

In the end, the reason to make butter from scratch isn't thrift (though a butter-churning birthday party for children could provide cheap thrills). But it's worth it, if only once, to be reminded of what butter actually is. To produce this golden substance from nothing but elbow grease and cream feels something like magic.